Attempting to bounce back from an early defeat in Tokyo, Marin Cilic begins his bid for the Rolex Shanghai Masters title against 22-year-old Chilean Nicolas Jarry.

Cilic suffered a shock defeat to Jan-Lennard Struff in the first round of the Rakuten Japan Open last week where he was defending semifinal points, in what was the world no. 6’s second event since reaching the quarterfinals of the US Open.

Cilic in action in Tokyo (Photo by Matt Roberts/Getty Images)

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Cilic followed his US Open run by representing Croatia in their Davis Cup semifinal against the USA, beating Frances Tiafoe but losing to Sam Querrey before compatriot Borna Coric won the decisive fifth rubber to send Croatia through to what will be the last final of the Davis Cup as we have known it.

For the rest of the season, Cilic will be competing with one eye on that Davis Cup final, which will see Croatia face off with France. But he also has plenty of business left to take care of in the 2018 ATP World Tour season, with the 2014 US Open champion looking to qualify for the Nitto ATP Finals for the fifth time in four years.

Cilic, who made his ATP Finals debut in 2014 and also featured in 2016-17, is currently in sixth place with four players qualified and while that sounds like quite a comfortable position, he doesn’t have a mammoth lead on the players chasing him.

The Australian Open runner-up has compiled a 38-15 win-loss record in 2018, highlighted by, obviously, a third Grand Slam final appearance in Melbourne in January. He also won the Queen’s Club title in June, made the quarterfinals of the French Open and the US Open (suffering a bizarre loss to Guido Pella at Wimbledon) and was a semifinalist at both the Rome Masters and the Cincinnati Masters.

Cilic joined the select group of Masters 1000 Series champions in 2016 when he won in Cincinnati, and has had occasional strong results in Shanghai in the past, although overall he continues to under-perform at Masters 1000 Series level: He was a quarterfinalist in 2012, and reached the semifinals in 2017 with wins over Kyle Edmund, Steve Johnson and Albert Ramos-Vinolas before losing to Rafael Nadal.

After a first-round bye, Cilic’s Rolex Shanghai Masters campaign starts against Nicolas Jarry, who booked his place in the second round by defeating Mischa Zverev 6-4, 3-6, 7-6(5).

Nicolas Jarry (Photo by Kevin Lee/Getty Images)

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Jarry hit an impressive 18 aces during the win over Zverev, which was the sixth of his career over a top-100 player on hard courts.

Still quite a youngster at 22, Jarry – the grandson of a former ATP World Tour pro – reached the final of the French Open in doubles as a junior before turning pro. Making his first Challenger final in Quito in 2014, Jarry broke into the top 200 in 2015, the same year he played his first ATP World Tour matches when he qualified for the Ecuador Open in Quito. After a sophomore slump in 2016 that took him back outside the world’s top 500, Jarry rebuilt during a very successful 2017 season which saw him win three Challenger titles and finish runner-up at two more Challenger events as well as successfully qualifying for the French Open, ending the year at world no. 99.

In 2018, Jarry has continued to rise with impressive speed and comes into the Rolex Shanghai Masters ranked inside the top 50. Unsurprisingly for a South American player, most of Jarry’s strong results have come on clay courts, most notably during the Golden Spring when he made the semifinals of the 500-level Rio Open, beating world no. 19 Albert Ramos-Vinolas before losing to Diego Schwartzman, and went on to reach a first ATP World Tour final in Sao Paulo, losing to Fabio Fognini.

Jarry also went on to make the semifinals of the 500-level Hamburg event in July, beating world no. 8 Dominic Thiem on the way, and made the semifinals of Kitzbuhel where he beat Fernando Verdasco. So it’s been a tremendously impressive year for the young Chilean on clay courts.

Hard courts, though, are still a bit of a work in progress for Jarry, who is 21-11 on clay in 2018 but only 7-7 on hard courts. He has only recorded back-to-back wins once in 2018 on hard courts, beating Jan-Lennard Struff and Andreas Seppi to make the quarterfinals of Winston-Salem.

Jarry has never beaten a top-10 player on hard courts, but he has obviously beaten Thiem on clay, and recently stretched John Isner to five sets at the US Open, so we can safely say he isn’t afraid of facing the big names. The big-serving Chilean currently has the 15th highest ‘serve rating’ on the ATP World Tour, averaging 8.5 aces per match and 73.5% of points won behind his first serve (by comparison, Cilic is 9th overall, averaging 10.5 aces and 78.7% of points won behind his first serve).

The key for both players will be holding their own serves and waiting to pounce on any opportunity that might come on their opponent’s serve – or executing well in a tie-break, at least one of which seems likely. Jarry has the advantage of already having played and won a match in Shanghai, but experience and confidence is clearly on Cilic’s side – it should be enough to see him through to the third round of the Rolex Shanghai Masters on Tuesday.

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Cilic vs Jarry tennis live streaming, preview and predictions – Can big-serving Jarry hand Cilic another early defeat in Shanghai?

Marin Cilic vs Nicolas Jarry live streaming, preview and predictions for the Shanghai Masters second-round match on Tuesday 9 October 2018: Cilic tries to bounce back from early loss in Tokyo as he takes on fast-rising Chilean Nicolas Jarry